The Ed Techie

Earning every mile

The end of the year is time for my traditional running review post, much to the pleasure of absolutely no-one, including myself. Still, that's what traditions are for, so here goes.

First, the data part, because you're worth it:

• Total distance: 1028 miles
• Number of runs: 136
• Total duration: 182 hours
• Average distance: 7.56 miles
• Average duration: 1hr 16mins
• Average pace: 10.09 min/mile

Compared with last year, where I was a bit lost and only did a total of 831 miles, this was a big improvement, and I finally broke that 1000 mile barrier. Even so, this still only comes in at just over half an hour a day on average. That's not actually that much time is it? I probably spent this much time watching Masterchef. So there is plenty of time to do more. I like this video that asks, 'can you fit in all the sleeping, watching TV and being online time into 23.5 hours a day?':

 

The biggest single factor in increasing mileage this year was running two marathons. I did my first one back in April in an ok time of 4hrs 11mins and then a second one in November in a poor time of 4hrs 30mins. I learnt two things about myself from these experiences.

Firstly, ignorance is a kind of bliss. When I first started running I thought doing a 10K was a big deal. Then I moved up to, and stayed at, half marathon distance. But having done a marathon now, I have knowledge of long distance, and I don't think I could be happy with just staying at shorter distances. The problem is I like those shorter distances, and I'm even worse at longer ones. Sometimes newly acquired knowledge isn't always a blessing. Like when you begin to understand about writing or film making, you can't simply 'enjoy' a book or a film anymore, there is always some critical appraisal occurring. But of course, this brings with it pleasures of its own, and longer distances do have that. They also have a lot of really boring, slogging it out miles too though.

Secondly, I have to earn every mile. I am not a natural athlete. I know people who put in less training than me and complete a marathon in 3 hours. Even if I gave up work and concentrated solely on running, I couldn't do that - we're just built differently. This came home to me as I struggled around the second marathon in Nice. I hadn't put in the same level of training as for the first marathon, and it showed. There was no reserve of natural talent I could draw upon - every bloody mile has to be earnt.

In making my tenuous connection to learning, I'd say there are a lot of similarities. Some people can breeze through a course and an exam, others have to work hard, study long hours and fret through the night for every single mark. And no matter how hard they try most people won't achieve top marks, but they still study and learn and gain from it. Learning, like running, is about competition with yourself, not others.

How to undermine Facebook

Like many people, I have a Facebook profile, but it isn't something I use much. And like many people I've become increasingly uneasy about the way our interactions are monetised and manipulated. I don't mind this to an extent - I'm willing to trade off free use of something for some adverts I ignore, for example. But it's begun to feel all rather insidious with Facebook.

Alan Levine posted that he wasn't going to dramatically quit Facebook, but his plan was to maintain a non-presence:

But quitting seems to pointless. Or impactless. So I have an evil plot. I am keeping my facebook account, but I have completely neutralized its presence. I belong to no groups, like nothing, or use anything that sucks in my information 

But I think you could take this one step further. In those fantasy books and comics, when a human needs to slay a monster, they nearly always have an epiphany where they use it's own strength against it. The same approach could be applied to the behemoth of Facebook.

What Facebook really sells to companies is meaningful data and connections. The key to this is that they are meaningful. If I 'Like; a company it matters because my friends will believe that I really endorse their products. If I install an app it's because it appeals to me. And if people who Like X tend to also Like Y then that becomes valuable data.

But what if those actions weren't meaningful? What if they were genuinely, and deliberately random? A company may get some benefit along the lines of 'all publicity is good publicity', but the real value of knowing it's something I genuinely like is removed. And this corrupts the data set, because those connections between points are no better than a random number generator.

So, if I was a real hacktivist type, I'd create a tool that searches Facebook and randomly suggests companies to Like and apps to install. Then we'd all do it, and Mark Zuckerberg would cry 'I'm melting, I'm melting.'

This is only a half-serious suggestion - the point I want to make is that in social media, it is integrity that counts - data integrity, personal integrity and behavioural integrity. Which prevents marketing firms and retailers with a problem as often they are trying to modify or coerce this integrity. But as soon as you do that, the whole approach becomes meaningless. If I retweet something because I might get a prize, then people don't value that tweet. And so the moral is, don't sell your integrity cheaply. And don't manipulate our integrity or we can use it against you.

The three ghosts of open access articles

WARNING - this post contains stretching of a flimsy idea to breaking point. Look away if you find strained literary metaphors distressing.

In keeping with the festive season, I'm going to frame some thoughts on stages of academic publishing with a Dickensian motif. I'm trying to develop an approach that covers three phases of a journal article's life, so let's go for a Christmas Carol. 

The Ghost of Articles Past - Scrooge is shown his own past Christmases, and given to reflect and reinterpret them. The ghost says he is there for Scrooge's 'reclamation'. For articles, they are usually published in a journal, where they may receive an initial flurry of interest, and unless they become a standard text they fall into obscurity (indeed most never emerge from obscurity). As I mentioned in my last post, I'm interested in the possibilities that open access allows for a new life for articles, for them to be taken, republished in different collections or reused in different contexts. This can happen with existing, proprietary articles but it's a closed process, it is open access that allows for the generative, innovative reuse that will allow articles to be reclaimed.

This idea is somewhat in its infancy in terms of meta-journals and having a critical mass of open access content, but in other ways one of the oldest practices online with bookmarking, linking, blogging. So it indeed resembles the first of Dickens' spirits in being "like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium"

The Ghost of Articles Present - This is the easiest one, as it represents the norm. I've written about academic publishing a lot, especially in this chapter of my book, so I won't repeat it all here. But despite the many criticisms we may have of it, the carefully researched, well-written and peer-reviewed article has a strong place in academia and is in many ways the core practice that allows it to distance itself from commercial or marketing influence. But it's also a bloated industry in its own right and one that is both bountiful and undergoing change, just as Scrooge is in the midst of change as he views the different interpretations of present Christmas. So we can both see the current publishing model as akin to the Ghost who was "a jolly Giant, glorious to see" and also one who like the Ghost of Christmas Present is destined to fade soon.

The Ghost of Articles Yet To Come - one of the most interesting developments over recent years has been the rise of the physics pre-print repository arXiv. Articles that are ‘published’ here are not peer-reviewed, so can be pre-publication, or unpublished. An initial filter is applied, which is that the article is of reviewable quality. To quote the arXiv founders: “that they would not be peremptorily rejected by any competent journal editor as nutty, offensive, or otherwise manifestly inappropriate, and would instead at least in principle be suitable for review.”

ArXiv has become the de facto distribution medium for scholarly articles in Physics, with Sir Martin Rees commenting it has “transformed the literature of physics, establishing a new model for communication over the whole of science. Far fewer people today read traditional journals. These have so far survived as guarantors of quality. But even this role may soon be trumped by a more informal system of quality control, signaled by the approbation of discerning readers”. 

These are articles that have not yet been published, but could be. They are thus akin to the Christmases of the future that Scrooge sees - they are shadows, possibilities, but not definite. In the removal of the heavy peer-review process this approach strikes fear into many academics, like the Ghost who "was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form... the Spirit neither spoke nor moved"

My plan is to try and cover all three of these aspects. I have the Meta EdTech Journal, am an editor on JIME, and am trying to set up an arXiv type pre-print for ed tech. I think people often see new technological approaches supplanting old ones, but it's the complementary nature I find interesting. It is the advent of alternatives to previously monolithic systems that is exciting.

So, join with me and Scrooge in saying:

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"

 

Launching Meta EdTech Journal

The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view.

I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum - a WordPress theme for creating open access journals.

So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple - three times a year an issue will be published, collating some of the articles from the open access ed tech journals. At the moment this is at my discretion, but I would welcome an editorial board, or perhaps editors to work on very focused special editions. You could imagine very interesting special editions drawing on the open access journals in all manner of subjects, and using material from the past three years or so. A Meta EdTech Medical Education Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Social Media Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Mobile Learning Special Edition? Well, you get the idea, they're all relatively easy to do.

Now, you could say, 'so what?'. After all, there's nothing in this I couldn't do in a blog, delicious, tumblr, paper.li, scoop.it, etc. However, I have come to the conclusion rather late in life, that context is important. By looking roughly journalish, calling itself a journal, behaving like a journal, and crucially only gathering together journal articles, it begins to feel like a journal. And that might be of interest to a few people. 

What I find most interesting about this though is the potential for interdisciplinarity. I have gone for a fairly boring Ed Tech focus, but you could have some really interesting intersection. Interdisciplinary journals have traditionally suffered because of the economics of publishing - they just don't have a big enough audience. But if you are drawing on open access publications, you can make an interdisciplinary journal on any subject you want (provided there are enough open access papers to draw upon). Classics and Manga Studies? You bet. Postmodernism and Sports Psychology? Why not.

The other mild revelation, is that it's yet another example of what I like about open access. It's the unpredictability and different uses that content can be put to that is really exciting. Your article no longer sits in just one journal, but may appear in dozens of different 'mashup' or meta journals. Each of these may have a different audience, beyond the scope of the original journal. Again, as an author, why wouldn't you want this? The development of meta-journals itself may be a driver for open access, since authors want to be included in them.

A couple of admin points: I've tried to give the proper attribution for each paper but if anyone thinks it looks as though I'm trying to claim authorship, let me know (it automatically adds 'Author' as the person who creates the post, which is annoying). I'm not a WordPress expert so I'm not sure I've set it up optimally. For instance I couldn't see how to create Issues, so I have simply created a page for each issue, and listed in the sidebar. Again, any thoughts on this are welcome.

We'll see how it goes, maybe no-one will read it, as the other tools I've mentioned above already fulfill this function. But for now, it was kinda cool to think 'this afternoon, I'm going to create a journal, on my own, with no funding.'